The Joomla Content Management System has a very large developer and user community.  Much of their accumulated knowledge resides in the Joomla Documentation website and the Joomla Forums.  All things Joomla are accessible from the Joomla home page.

Viewing the Site

There are 3 levels of access when viewing a Joomla web site.

Public - what the public sees
Registered - what the logged in users will see... this would be for your normal members
Special - what those with special permissions will see....I'd envision a few committee members having access to this stuff

Virtually every item in the website has access control....menu items, articles, modules and user profile tabs are all assigned an access level of Public, Registered or Special.

Tip: You may want to open these instructions in a separate tab or print them by clicking the printer icon to the right of the title.

Step 1: Login

Login to the website with your Username and Password. (Website Usernames and Passwords are available from your site administrator)

If you have Author level access or above, a new menu item, Site, should appear in the main menu.  Click on Site>>Article Submission

Step 2: Write Your Article

Type the article's title in the Title Box.

Click in the content area below the formatting menus.  You should see a blinking cursor in the upper left corner.

Type your article in the content area.

Some Tips....

You may want to use the B button to occasionally highlight certain text as bold.  The Format box in the top row of the editor is useful.  For normal text it should be set to "Paragraph".    For headings you can experiment with "Heading 1", "Heading 2", "Heading 3"..... settings.  These supply heading formats that are already designed into the template.

For example:  

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Paragraph

In general, use the formatting tools sparingly or not at all.  Most importantly do not change colors and do not change fonts.  The website has a template that supplies a standard formatting for all pages.  The more we stick with the standard formatting, the more professional the site looks.

If you have pictures to add, click the image button located below the content area.  You must first upload an image to the appropriate folder (kids, stock, stuff are likely folders) and then insert the image in your table.  Contact the webmaster for help if needed or just send the images to the webmaster to add them.

The natural tendency is to generate content in Word or Excel and than cut and paste into the web editor.   Please don't.  These make a mess out of the formatting and cause a lot of editing rework for your webmaster.  If you are using material from a Word document, copy and paste it into Windows Notepad or Mac Text Editor.   Than copy and paste from that application into the Joomla editor.   This process will remove the excess formatting code that comes with Word.

Step 3: Fill in the Publishing Info (Optional)

Section: Select the appropriate Section

Category:  Select the appropriate Category

Author Alias: Enter your name as you'd like it to appear in the article byline.

Finish Publishing:  If you have a date when you want the article off the website, put it here.  Otherwise, delete the date in this box and leave it blank.

The rest......ignore.

Step 4: Save Your Article

Click the Save button to the right of the Title box.

Congratulations....you're done !

Your article will automatically be submitted to your site administrator for review and publishing.

Don't forget to check back in a day or so and review your article on the website.

If an article needs unpublished, the article's author and the site administrator have the capabiltiy to do this.  If you're not the author, contact the author or the site administrator.

If you are the author, here's the steps to unpublish.

1. Login to your site.

2. Locate your article on the site.

3. Click Edit icon at the top of that article.

4.  Scroll down to the Finish Publishing box.

5. Click the calendar icon and set the date to when you want the article to finish publishing.  If you want it off now, set the date to yesterday or earlier.

6. Click Save.

7. Navigate to the page where the article was and verify it's gone.  Unpublished articles are still visible to administrators or authors in a lighter than normal font.   If it's not, click Refresh on your browser and check again.

That should do it.  Any problems, contact the site administrator.

This article gives a step by step guide to adding photos to your website articles.  There are a lot of little steps to this process so you should print this article and have it at the ready while inserting pictures.

**** I've recently found a really cool online photo editor at www.picnik.com that makes the photo editing process much simpler.  I've revised this fax to reflect using the online picnik.com editor.  (9 feb 2010, : D)

Preparing your Picture for Uploading

Before you upload your picture to the website, there are several tasks that should be performed on your computer.  These insure your picture has an appropriate size, name and format.

Resize Your Photo

Today's cameras create very large picture files.   Files can typically be 1 -10MB.   These are way to large for the web.   They slow page downloads and eat up disk space.  For the website, we like photo file sizes in the 100-500KB range.

There are many tools to resize photos.  I've written a faq using one free online service called pixlr.com.

Adding Your Picture to Your Article

Inserting Your Picture

- Login to your website.

- Open Your Article

- Place Your Cursor at the Location in Your Article Where You Want Your Picture

- Click on the "Image" button (below the text edit box on the left side)

- Open the Stories folder

- Open an appropriate sub-folder in which to store your photo.  If there is no obvious folder use Articlepics.

- Click Browse and locate your picture on your computer

- Click Upload which will copy your picture from your computer to the subfolder on the website

- Click on your picture.  The file name will now appear in the URL box.

- Select an alignment, Left or Right, which will set which side of your article your picture will appear.

- Fill in a very brief description of your picture.  Do not use kids names in the description.

-  Click Insert.  Your picture should now be in your article.

A Little Formatting Cleanup

- Click on your picture.  The edges shoould be highlighted.

- Click on the "photo of a tree icon" in your editor

- Uncheck the Margin Equalize box.  If you aligned your picture Left, place 10 in the Right Margin box.  If you aligned you picture Right, place 10 in the Left margin box.  This creates a little space between your picture and the text.

- Click Insert.

- You may want to Resize your picture to fit the article. 

- You can adjust the size of your picture using the Dimensions boxes.  However, this method can slow down your page.  The preferred method is to resize your photo with an external photo editor and load it with the desired size.
 

- Save your article.


Congratulations, you've posted an article with a picture.

In this example we are resizing a photo to fit a specific 400px x 300px slideshow frame.  Our goal is to optimize our picture for best presentation in this frame.  These specific instructions use the free online photo editing service at pixlr.com/editor .   A good photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop will accomplish the same result.

Choose your photo on your computer.

Go to pixlr.com/editor .  Click the "Open Image from Computer" button and upload your photo.

Click "Image/Crop" on the menu.

In the "Constraint" drop down box select "Aspect Ratio".

Set width to 400 and height to 300.

Select and area of your picture by dragging the crop tool across your picture.

Slide the corners of the constraint box until you get the view you want. 

Click the "crop" icon and save your changes.

Now click "Image/Size" on the menu.

Change the width dimension to "400".  The height dimension should automatically change to "300".

Click "OK"

Click "File/Save" on the menu.

Give your photo a NEW descriptive file name such that other site admins will recognize when and where it came from.   ie..1010RyderCup1.jpg   The new name is important as to not overwrite your higher quality original when you put it back on your computer.

Set the format to "JPG" and slide the "quality" slider to the right so long as your file size does not exceed 300kb.

Click "Save" to download your edited file back to your computer.

Congratulations your picture is now properly sized and named for use on your website.

Many Dave Dodds Web Development websites include the Acymailing newsletter tool.

Here's the basics of sending a Newsletter using Acymailing.

Much more detailed support is available at http://www.acyba.com/en/support/documentation.html

I recommend you start on the tutorial section of that page.

Here' s some basics....

- Login

- Navigate to the website Newsletter page.  Many times this might be Articles>>Newsletters

- There should be a "+" plus sign at the bottom of this page.  Click the "+" to launch the Newsletter Component with a freshly loaded template.

- Fill the Subject box.   This Subject will be the subject of your email.

- Fill the alias box with something short and descriptive of this particluar newsletter.

- Select the newsletter Lists you want to whom to send the newsletter.

- Scroll down the page to the Newsletter editor there you can:

- Carefully, replace the template text with your new newsletter text

- Add pictures and links.  Please refer to my other faq's on adding pictures and adding links.

- For the advanced user, you can use web articles and modules in your newsletter using the "tags" tool at the top of the page

- When you are satisfied with your content click "Preview/Send" at the top of the page.  This will save your edits and show you how the actual Newsletter will appear.

- If you feel the need to make changes, clicking "Edit"will take you back to the Newsletter Editor.

- When you are satisfied, I recommend you use the "Send a Test" feature to send a copy of the Newsletter to your email account for review.

- When you are ready to send the Newsletter, you have two choices.

- In Preview mode, click "Send" to start sending your Newsletter to your Newsletter List immediately

- In Preview mode, click "Schedule" to schedule a start time to start sending your Newsletter.

- Acymailing throttles the rate that your Newsletter emails are sent.  This improves the chances that they won't be considered spam.  As such, it may take some time for all your recipeints to receive their newsletters.

Don't hesitate to call Dave for help.  More reference materials are available at www.acyba.com .

Cheers,

: D